W dniu 19.03.2021 o 09:10, Stefan Skoglund pisze:
ons 2021-03-17 klockan 10:13 +0000 skrev Seymour J Metz:
Yes, z/OS on z is attractive for a medium or large customer, but it
is priced out of the market for a hobbyist or a "Mom and Pop"
business. The entry cost is much lower for, e.g., openSUSE on a PC. I
miss the days of 80% discounts for Academia.
Of course, if you need high I/O bandwidth or RAS, ...
I don't know if i want to agree with you ...
A medium business in the nordic countries don't uses mainframes.
It could be that it is more System i (depending on what application
package ie movex
they have choosen) or something running on Windows server or some
version of Solaris or HP-UX. Telia earlier were a heavy user of VMS and
OSF.
So were Vattenfall - all of them is now i believe on Windows or
something.
One reason is the dearth of knowledgeable people who wants to bet their
careers on the mainframe (and COBOL and RPG.)
The banks run their central system on z/OS, though. But where is the
expansion ?
I dont know what workloads Volvo now runs on their mainframe, or what
Evry has on their machines for their customers.
Actually there are definitely more companies using mainframe than in
Poland. Note: population of Poland is more than 4x population of Sweden.
And of course your banks and insurers use mainframe (Swedbank,
Postgirot, ICA, If, Folksam, Skandia...), but also other organizations
like Volvo (they actually have mainframes in Lyon, which is a little bit
south of Sweden, and they have strong IT team in Poland), Alecta, SPP,
Svenska Spel, SJ, SCA, Barycent, SAS Airlines, Telia, Ericsson.
(note: it based on public information and may not be 100% up to date)
To be honest, similar situation is in Danmark, but it seems Finland and
Norway have less mainframe users. And let's not forget about Iceland,
which is Nordic as well - they have parallel sysplex (population: 304k)
Regarding dearth - to be honest I had to check this word, because I
suspected it was typo in "death". :-)
However I know many people with non-scandinavian names which support
mainframes in Sweden and other Nordic countries. I mean people who
completed education in other countries and started job career there. In
Poland we have offices where mainframers support Nordea and Danish
banks. Some banks even opened IT offices in India.
So - there is dearth (or lack) of IT specialists, but: 1. It is not only
mainframe problem, 2. there are solutions available.
BTW: approx. ten years ago I've got untypical job offer: they wanted to
hire me and my team. Yes, they were looking for a team just to have time
for knowledge transfer from older, almost-retired employees
--
Radoslaw Skorupka
(looking for new job)
Lodz, Poland
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